by
Gordon L. Bowen, Ph.D.
Professor of Political Science
Mary Baldwin College
Staunton VA 24401
This essay last was updated January 29, 2007
For student use in studying for Political Science 111, Comparative Politics, at Mary Baldwin College. Not for citation or other use without written permission of the author. Protected by the copyright laws of the United States.
Separate sections below address: terms useful in understanding the topic, Anglo-Irish relations prior to and after the 19th century, the conflict and the partition of Ireland in the early 20th Century, British-Eire relations after 1922, the "Troubles" that began in 1968, which led to direct rule, various failed attempts at power-sharing among communities, the Thatcher era (1979-90), the Anglo-Irish Accords of 1985, the impact of Northern Irish terrorism on civil liberties, the Blair Government and the 1998 Good Friday Accords and related contemporary issues. A map of the province, showing the geographic distribution of sectarian communities in the province is linked here.
Introduction. Can democratic institutions forge social peace by establishing genuine power sharing among divided, sectarian communities? This is the general question of governance posed by the case of Northern Ireland. Filled with inter-communal political violence since 1968, only in 1998 did genuine progress begin toward finding a substitute for the politics of the gun. What are the origins of the conflict between Catholic and Protestant communities, and how did it develop? How effectively has the Government of the United Kingdom played a constructive role in managing that conflict? Do peace agreements in our times appear likely to succeed? These are the central concerns this essay attempts to answer.
The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 created a basis on which the leaders of each community agreed to stop fighting; majorities in each community then ratified the agreement in popular referenda. But actually ending the uniquely Northern Irish politics of violence and intimidation seems to require more. The disarming of political factions under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement may prove to be one key. That 1998 agreement foresaw a new future, one built around the establishment of democratic institutions, and an end to violence. The premise was that if these two steps were taken, social peace might widen. If political power, both executive and legislative, genuinely could be shared, each community's grievances would have an outlet other than violence. According to peace makers' thinking, frustration with government then would no longer reinforce cultural traditions highlighting the use of violence to settle political disputes. Thus, with time to unlearn old habits, the conflict might one day end. Or at least so ran the hopes.
The case, however, is broader than simply a conflict between two sectarian communities in one province in the U.K. It has an international dimension, as the link between Great Britain and Northern Ireland is an additional and disputed element. Objection to British rule over Northern Ireland is central to the grievances of the largely Catholic Northern Irish nationalist community: they want the Brits out of all of Ireland and reunification of the six British-ruled counties in the north of the island under one Irish flag, the flag of the Republic of Ireland, or Eire. Ardent support for continuation of British sovereignty over Northern Ireland, on the other hand, is central to the grievances of the largely Protestant Loyalist community: they view the Union with Great Britain as permanent, and oppose any ties with Eire (as the rest of Ireland formally is known). Thus, the question of sovereignty is central to the dispute.
Some have suggested that this root disagreement be settled once and for all using democratic procedures. If the matter of reunification were to be put to a popular vote, according to this way of thinking, the healing waters of democracy could put out any and all fires in the hearts of Irishmen. This point of view found favor chiefly within the Protestant community of Northern Ireland, for Protestants substantially outnumber Catholics in the province. Such a popular referenda formally was proposed, March 9, 2002, by the elected leader of the (then) largest political party based in the Protestant community, David Trimble of the the Ulster Unionist Party. Trimble's proposal, made in the form of a referenda on Irish re-unification on which he would then have asked his supporters to vote NO, would almost certainly have resulted in the defeat of re-unification, and would have established that the popular will of the majority in Northern Ireland preferred continuation of ties to Britain, a fitting affirmation of the formal name of the state: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But such a vote also might have re-ignited simmering passions in the Nationalist community who view Ireland as one nation, a nation divided into two states by Britain, but a nation one day to be re-united as one state: Eire. Given the potential divisiveness of such a referenda, no such voting occurred.
This is somewhat ironic. In both the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement and the 1998 Good Friday accords, the will of the majority in the North is declared to be the only basis for any constitutional change in the status of Northern Ireland. These terms have been repeatedly accepted by the British Government, the Government of Eire (i.e., Ireland), and by moderate politicians in both Protestant and Catholic communities of Northern Ireland. While only extremist elements in each community have openly rejected the general principle of majority rule as a pre-condition for any change, many politicians -- not only in Northern Ireland-- have found reasons to oppose taking steps toward learning at regular intervals the will of the contemporary majority on this vital question.
A deeper peace once seemed proximate. In the Spring of 1998, all major political factions signed the "Good Friday" peace agreement. It for the first time included a power sharing arrangement that aimed to include significant political factions of both Nationalist and Loyalist communities in democratic decision making about the province's governance and future. But auspicious beginnings in Ireland have been many, and as many times beginnings have come to naught. Just months after the basic Good Friday Agreement was signed, on August 15, 1998, at Omagh (a small town in a rural area), a terrorist bomb killed 28 and injured another 220, the largest casualty toll from a single bomb in the entire modern history of Northern Ireland's "Troubles." Nationalist groups claimed credit. Faced with such continued threats, two major Loyalist paramilitary organizations, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defense Association (UDA), saw little reason for themselves to disband. Though few in either community have openly declared it to be their wish to return to bombings as their preferred method of making political statements, the related habit of refusing to compromise with one's opponents has died with more difficulty. Four years of attempting to rule Northern Ireland through power sharing divided more than united the Nationalist and Loyalist participants in the experiment. Effective governance proved elusive and, in October 2002, Britain was forced to suspend the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive; the U.K. Government of Tony Blair resumed the direct rule over the province that the U.K. Governments had exercised, 1972-98. Though the immediate cause of this was failure by Nationalist paramilitaries to demonstrate that they genuinely had embraced peace by surrendering their guns, resistance to power sharing among some in the Loyalist community also had contributed to the failure of self-government in Northern Ireland. British direct rule, which is no parties first choice, became the default position of nearly all; it continues to this day.
Why Americans should care. As much as Americans have good reason to want to know the strengths and limits of democracy as a formula for peace, Americans have still sharper and special reasons for retaining an interest in relations between British and Irish ethnicities on the British Isles. According to US Census data (Hacker: 46-7), 9.76 million US citizens trace their ancestry exclusively to the Irish ethnicity. Among all European ancestries, only Germany (17.1 million) and England (11.5 million) are identified by more US citizens as the sole point of origin of their forbearers. Moreover, among those Americans who report to the Census Bureau a mixture of European ancestries, 43 million report links to Ireland, a number even greater than the 40 million who report that some, but not all, of their ancestors came from England. Thus, to many Irish, America has been a second home; and to many Irish-Americans, Ireland (or, properly, Eire) is a focus for deep emotional attachment.
But the island of Ireland also is a land of some complexity. On it are two states: the entirety of the state of Eire, fully independent since 1949; and a small part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as Ulster or Northern Ireland. Some ethnic complexity exists in each of these states: the population of Eire is composed 95 percent of followers of Roman Catholicism; the British part of Ireland is about 35 percent Catholic and the other 65 percent is made up of followers of various Protestant faiths. The forbearers of this latter group played a large role in the settlement of Pennsylvania and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where they were called "Scotch-Irish." The descendants of their ancestors who stayed in Ireland are known there as Irish Protestants, Orangemen and a variety of other political terms (below). The inability of the Catholic and Protestant communities of Ulster to live easily among one another has posed one of the most difficult challenges to British government. This reading explores these difficulties and their implications for a full understanding of Britain and of democracy.
In studying British democracy, typically we examine several dimensions of life there, including for example the political steps that produced modern electoral forms, the mechanisms of contemporary British government, the social and ideological bases of the leading political parties there, public policy choices the British have made (e.g., National Health Insurance, nationalization and then de-nationalization of industries, etc.), and other important issues. By learning how this activist government has retained accountability to the popular will at key historic crossroads, we often come to view this flexible government as the byproduct of a stable society, as a civic culture well led. Indeed, the ways in which British governments have responded to international threats such as that from fascism in the 1930s-40s provide useful lessons both about their nation and, more generally, about the responsibility of all democratic leaders when faced with anti-democratic threats (see related discussion here). At bottom, it often seems that learning about British values, in politics as much as in theater or literature, comprises learning about some of the best in the human experience.
In this reading, however, the mortal side of this warm, fuzzy portrait comes under the sharp glare of a different light. Here we will examine the challenge posed to the orderly operation of the British democratic system by the aspirations of much of the Irish nationality, within and beyond the U.K. Unlike the genteel mode of most British political discourse, for eight hundred years the Irish-British dialogue has been unusually acrimonious, bitter. Among the Irish, a strong sense of Irish nationalism has taken root and has evolved to produce strongly separatist aspirations among most Irishmen, abetted in no small measure by the presence of the British Armed Forces in Northern Ireland which continues to this day. For centuries, time and again Irish activists have sought final and complete removal of these troops to Britain; and others have implored them to stay. Throughout Irish history, peaceful advocacy of this cause has competed with those who champion the use of other, violent means, and many Irish have embraced the temptation to turn to violence. In our century, tensions between this distinct subculture and the British have produced numerous opportunities for statesmen and many are the compromises which have been tried. Yet the British Army remains in Ulster and, after 1969, its very presence long galvanized support among some Irish for the reemergence of one uncompromising group, the "Provisional" Irish Republican Army (also known simply as I.R.A., or "the Provos"), and of the terrorist tactics it long freely advocated and practiced. Protestant paramilitaries, equally committed to a politics of violence, emerged virtually concurrently. Terrorism by both groups in turn has helped to create an atmosphere in which many Britons have come to be willing to support governmental abbreviation of basic rights in order to bring the terrorism of all groups to an end. Appreciating the corrosive effect of all this on British life can help us more fully to know our own Irish roots as we measure anew British democracy.
Structure of the Reading. We first will briefly review the origins of British-Irish enmity. Then we will examine democratic and anti-democratic courses which have been followed by those seeking to modify the relationships among the peoples of the British Isles. While these issues significantly enrich our understanding of the nature of British democracy, we should also keep these issues in proportion: it should be recognized that less than four percent of the population of the United Kingdom now lives in Northern Ireland.
Defining Terms
The following words have acquired special meanings when they are used to discuss Ireland and Britain:
Loyalist: a resident of Northern Ireland who feels him/herself to be loyal to the British Crown; generally, many more Northern Ireland residents of the Protestant faiths consider themselves "Loyalists" than do Catholics.
Unionist: technically speaking, a follower of one of the Northern Ireland political parties that favor permanent "union" of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In a more general sense, most Northern Ireland residents of the Protestant faiths consider themselves "Unionists;" nearly all Catholics do not so view themselves. Unlike the case in the rest of the U.K., being a Unionist in Ulster does not necessarily imply being a member of a labor organization or trade union (though many working class Protestants additionally do belong to such unions). There are two major Unionist political parties in Ulster: the Ulster Unionist Party, led by Nobel Prize winning peace-maker David Trimble; and the Democratic Unionist Party, led by the Rev. Ian Paisley. In elections in 2003, Paisley's party finished first.
Nationalist: a resident of Northern Ireland who considers that all of Ireland is one nation (i.e., Eire), and that that nation should be joined together as one political state. Generally, Catholic residents of Northern Ireland are most likely to view themselves as "nationalists." A "nationalist" opposes continued British rule in Northern Ireland.
Sinn Fein: a legal political party in Northern Ireland. The name, pronounced "shin fane," means "Ourselves Alone" in the Gaelic language which originally was spoken on the island. Sinn Fein is a Nationalist organization: its elected MPs long refused to take their seats at the House of Commons (in London). Many Sinn Fein supporters are believed also to support the outlawed, underground I.R.A. Gerry Adams is the most prominent contemporary Sinn Fein leader.
Partition: was the act of dividing Ireland into two legal entities, the 26 southern counties constituting Eire and six northern counties constituting Northern Ireland. The partition of Ireland was a political compromise that attempted to bring an end to the Anglo-Irish War (1916-21). It led later to the complete independence of the 26 counties, and to continued British control over the 6 counties of Northern Ireland.
Home Rule: was the solution to the Irish problem advocated by the Irish Parliamentary Party's representatives to the British Parliament, 1886-1915. Failure of the I.P.P. to achieve this goal of meaningful local autonomy within the British empire led more radical Irish nationalists to begin on Easter 1916 an armed struggle for total independence. Some Catholic activists in Northern Ireland today view their current anti-British acts as the unbroken continuation of the struggle begun in 1916.
Direct Rule: has been the method of British rule in Northern Ireland since 1972. From 1921 to 1972, a local elected parliament sat at Stormont Castle and conducted many governing functions within the six counties of Northern Ireland. Its power was suspended thereafter. Northern Irish voters also select MPs to serve in the British House of Commons.
Eire: the name adopted by the state which covers the 26 counties of southern Ireland. The Constitution of the state of Eire, however, long claimed that it was the basic law for all of the island, including the six counties of Northern Ireland. This language worried the Protestants of the north.
Ulster: a familiar name used principally by Protestants to refer to the six counties of Northern Ireland.
British-Irish relations before 1916
A Gaelic people resided in what is now known as Ireland for many thousands of years. But, in 1170, the clash of cultures which concerns us here began with the arrival of Anglo-Norman invaders. The two cultures mixed poorly from this first violent encounter onward. The Gaelic Irish people resisted adoption of the tongue of the invaders and continued to speak Gaelic. This gap symbolized the distinction among the peoples: many could literally not communicate with one another.
Many other Gaelic customs ran counter to principles of English Common Law, hence routine administrative matters often were controversial after British rule was consolidated. Gaelic customs, for example, did not conform to the British practice of primogeniture in inheritance. This had important implications for the titling of properties, especially regarding who had legal authority for their sale to (typically absentee) English landlords. Many Gaelic Irishmen insisted that it was invalid for English courts to accept deeds signed over only by eldest sons whose signatures had been obtained, sometimes through chicanery, but which were recognized nevertheless as binding on deeds transferring ownership out of the hands of Irish clans. Thus, many Irishmen questioned the legitimacy of actions taken by British courts, especially as the richest resources on the island abruptly passed from Irish control to set the stage for poverty, emigration and rebellion as the major themes of the Irish predicament. English practices further salted these wounds by legally prohibiting intermarriage between the two groups, and by barring enforcement of rulings based on Gaelic Brehon law in the English courts established on the island.
Religious divisions in England further isolated the two major Irish groups culturally. Though the Gaelic Irish in Ireland remained virtually entirely Catholic in devotion, settlers from England obligingly conformed to the change in affiliation dictated when Henry VIII established the Church of England. Contemporaneous with this religious schism was expansion of a plantation system in the 16th and 17th centuries. As Catholic owners were displaced, approximately 35,000 Protestant settlers from Scotland, Wales and England were brought by the Crown to serve as tenant farmers. A Catholic rebellion in the northern Ulster area, in 1641, was directly in response to these changes. The rise of Cromwell as ruler of England brought an especially fervent chapter in the efforts of Englishmen to convert or exterminate the surviving Gaelic/Catholic population: Catholics were restricted to the poor Connacht region in the west, and were barred from the seacoast there as well. Though some of these trends partially were reversed after his demise, in 1680 only about twenty percent of the Irish land was owned by Catholic Irishmen (a slight increase which caused resentment among some of the Protestant settlers). After the Glorious Revolution (1688), the new English king (William of Orange) again militarily subdued all Irish resistance as he defeated the vanquished and Catholic King James in the still commemorated Battle of the Boyne (1690).
In the eighteenth century additional legal restrictions on Irish Catholics were enacted by Parliament. Penal laws further restricted landholding rights. Changes narrowed civil rights: most Catholics were barred from public office; the vote for public officials was denied all but a tiny few. Basic rights also were abridged: Catholics were forbidden to bear arms, own a horse worth more than five pounds sterling, or educate their children abroad (Foster: 165). By the end of that century, minor reforms coupled with encouraging revolutionary news received from abroad to kindle a generalized revolutionary movement among Catholics, the United Irishmen. Catholics and Protestants fought a pitched near civil war on the island, notably in the 1795 Battle of the Diamond, in County Armagh. The British response was two-fold: repression and enunciation of the Act of Union (1801) which effectively declared Ireland to be an integral part of Britain. Within Ireland, supporters of the Act of Union -- and of the Protestant martyrs who fell in the Battle of the Diamond-- organized a fraternal order, The Orange Order, so better to pledge the permanence of their allegiance to the British crown.
Nineteenth Century Activism. Irish nationalists struggled throughout the 19th century to make governments in London recognize the separate aspirations of most Irish people. Some pursued their objectives in a manner consistent with English norms. After the House of Commons' formal barrier to their entry was removed (1829), a few Irish Catholics took up the Irish nationalist cause as MPs engaged in Parliamentary politics. More pressing to most Irishmen, however, were the effects of the 1845 potato blight and resulting famine, 1845-47: one million Irish appear to have died from starvation; and another million emigrated from the island (Arnstein: 42).
Great new energy poured into new political organizations after the famine came to an end: the Irish Confederation, Irish Republican Brotherhood, Home Rule League, Irish National Land League and the Irish Parliamentary Party all soon were founded (Foster: 363-4). These and other groups' agitation affected Irish parliamentary delegates and the parties in Britain. After the 1880s, these efforts won token acceptance in the (English) Liberal Party, whose leaders made promises for eventual Irish "Home Rule." But the pace of reform was grindingly slow, and many Irishmen (and women) found themselves outlaws in their own land, deprived of a livelihood by British ownership of the key means of production, land. Like the migration to America of many real life Irish, the 1990s fictional film "Far and Away," starring Tom Cruise, movingly captured the angst of these Irish people in the 19th century.
Others chose not to leave, but to take up a more violent course in order to force the British out of Ireland. Known as Fenians, these 19th Century Irish radicals were the forbearers of the modern Irish terrorists. The Irish World newspaper, in 1880, applauded their violent plans: "London would be in flames, shooting up to the heavens in fifty different places" (in Laqueur: 113) if all Irishmen were to follow O'Donovan Rossa and the Fenians. While the Fenian William Mackey Lomasney urged a more focused targeting (i.e., that "would not hurt the hair of an Englishman's head," but only "strike terror into the government:" 116), the Fenian movement itself was so disorganized that the anger of most Irishmen it embodied never became a coordinated, terrorist movement. One of the responses to all this, however, was another round of repression, this time against the above-ground nationalist groups: the Land League was banned; and the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party was arrested (Charles Parnell), though later he was released.
Early Twentieth Century Polarization. Many Protestants resisted proposals for a Home Rule they feared would lead to their domination by Catholics. Organized Protestant resistance became more strident as the Government edged toward actually granting to Ireland some autonomy. On Easter 1912, Edward Carson's Ulster Volunteers (a paramilitary Protestant group) staged a demonstration and march against Home Rule in which over 100,000 were involved.
British military forces in Ireland appear to have been disinclined to suppress these Protestant paramilitary forces. In March 1914, in what later came to be known as the Curragh mutiny, a majority of the British officers at the key barracks near Dublin indicated that they would not cooperate with government orders to march on the North in order to suppress resistance to proposed Home Rule laws. (Such orders, however, never were given).
A famous Irish adage is "England's time of troubles is Ireland's time of opportunity." In the early 20th century such sentiments grew in popularity. Irish Nationalists who were unwilling any longer to wait for Home Rule embraced a strategy of revolutionary violence during the time in which Britain was engaged in war against Germany and the Central Powers. On Easter Sunday, April 24, 1916, Irish revolutionaries bombed the Post Office at Dublin and attacked other government offices in more than a dozen towns. Through this "Easter Rising," the Anglo-Irish War had begun, and 420 Irishmen died in its first week. Fifteen top leaders of the rising were executed, May 1916. Throughout the conflict, the Irish stood virtually alone: among all the nations of Europe, only the USSR (after 1918) officially recognized the Republic of Eire that had been declared by the Irish revolutionaries to be the lawful government of Ireland.
De Valera and the American Connection. America and Americans were intimately connected to the initial Irish rebellion and to the subsequent evolution of the anti-British movement in Ireland. The biography of one of the leading Irish revolutionaries, Eamon de Valera, encapsulates this Irish-American connection. Mr. de Valera was born (October 14, 1882) in New York City of an Irish mother and a Spanish father. At age three, upon his father's death, the child was sent to County Limerick to be raised in the home of an uncle. There he grew to maturity, joining the anti-British "Gaelic League" (1907) and later the revolutionary "Irish Brotherhood." By profession, de Valera was a schoolteacher of mathematics. His heart was in The Cause, however: a revolutionary unit under his command was among the last to surrender in 1916, after inflicting heavy casualties on British soldiers. For this de Valera was sentenced to death by British military courts. In another context, de Valera might have been seen as a terrorist; in Ireland, in 1917, this resume qualified the man to win election to Parliament as a member (indeed, the president) of the Sinn Fein ("Ourselves Alone") Party. Sinn Fein won three fourths of all of the Irish seats in the British Parliament in the elections of 1918, but all elected Sinn Fein M.P.s refused to take their seats there. Instead, de Valera was jailed, 1917-19, and was further charged with collaboration with the Germans during WW I. In May 1919, the unrecognized Irish parliament (Dial Eireann) secretly elected de Valera president of Eire; a month later he escaped prison and stowed away on a ship to New York. There, in 1919-20, de Valera raised more than $6 million for the cause of the Irish revolution.
Ultimately, in 1920, Britain sought compromise through the Government of Ireland Act enacted by Commons. It provided for the partition of Ireland, with 26 counties of the South to be granted "dominion status" (a form of self rule similar to the status of Canada at the time) and with 6 counties of the North (or Ulster) designated as remaining united as an integral part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. These terms were not initially acceptable to de Valera and the other Irish revolutionaries. They objected to the fact that Irish rulers would continue to have to swear allegiance to the British Crown. But in July 1921, a truce between the combatant sides was declared and an Anglo-Irish treaty was signed (January 1922) in which one faction of the revolutionaries agreed to these terms. The signatories, Griffith and Michael Collins, had a certain democratic mandate: their moderate Cumann da Gael party had succeeded in winning 64 seats to the newly recognized Irish Dail; de Valera's Sinn Fein had won 57 seats. (History and cinema buffs will enjoy a sympathetic portrait of Collins in the 1990s film of that name, "Michael Collins.")
Civil War. Many Irish revolutionaries, including de Valera, did not accept the terms of the Anglo Irish Treaty. These radicals argued that the island of Ireland was but one nation. Calling themselves "Nationalists," they continued the struggle to end all British presence in the entirety of Ireland. They objected to Dominion status for the South, insisting that complete independence be granted through the formation of a single, Irish Republic. But most of all, they rejected the partition of the island which left substantial numbers of Catholics in the 6 northern counties under the rule of the British and their "Loyalist" Protestant allies. Again, the Nationalists chose the gun and a bloody civil war then was fought among the Irish, 1922-23. During it the Roman Catholic Church declared some of the Nationalist resisters to be excommunicated; even communion was denied to the radicals. In the end, the groups which had accepted the partition prevailed. The rejectionists, or Nationalists, were defeated; de Valera again was jailed, this time by fellow Irishmen. However, the extremists' military force, the Irish Republican Army, remained alive as a hidden, clandestine force in Eire's politics. Moreover, de Valera's party (called Fianna Fail after 1926) proved increasingly popular to the voters of Eire: in 1926, de Valera himself was elected to the Dail. In 1932, de Valera became Prime Minister of Eire, an office in which he continued until 1948. Subsequently, he returned to office as Prime Minister (1951-54, 1957-59) and (ceremonial) President of Ireland (1959-1973). The Irish-American hero died in Dublin in 1975.
British relations with Eire
and the Irish after 1922
Under the governments of Fianna Fail in the 1930s, Eire waged an "economic war" against Britain in order to force renegotiation of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. Ultimately, the stronger nation forced Eire to pay 10 million British pounds in compensation for acts of sabotage. In 1936, the de Valera government enacted a new Constitution for Eire that declared that the entire island constituted the nation.
Eire remained neutral in the second World War, much to the chagrin of the besieged U.K, where many viewed this stance as pro-Hitler. British politicians responded with the "Prevention of Violence Act" of 1939, which allowed the Government to deport any suspicious Irishman, required that Irish in the UK must register with police, permitted warrant less searches of Irish in Britain, and allowed for detention without trial of "dangerous" Irishmen. Some considered that these measures were too extreme; and it must be noted that the Eire government never assisted Nazi Germany. Radicals of the Irish Republican Army, however, in "Operation Dove" did travel to Nazi Germany to receive paramilitary training, and did return to conduct limited guerrilla operations against British installations in Ulster during the war. Moreover, Nazi intermediaries were instrumental in securing the release of I.R.A. chief Frank Ryan from a Spanish jail. (Ryan had traveled to Spain as part of the international effort to assist the Spanish Republic against the fascist Franco rebellion there, 1936-39). The Eire government formally disapproved of these I.R.A. provocations: during the war the I.R.A. nearly was broken in the South; it survived better in Ulster, however. The arrival of 4000 U.S. Army soldiers in Ulster in January 1942 caused the I.R.A. there to table further efforts to reunite all of Ireland, as it was deemed tactically unwise to take actions against the Americans whose ranks included many Irish Americans.
Politicians and others in Eire continued to be disturbed by events in the North both before and after the War. Under the newly formed, Protestant-dominated local Parliament at Stormont Castle, and under the administration it appointed for Ulster, Roman Catholics informally were forced into specific neighborhoods ("ghettoization"), and were provided fewer social services there. At times, Catholics were subjected to periodic riots by Protestant mobs in which the local police were curiously indifferent to the attacks. Many thus were killed in Belfast in 1935, for example. In the 1920s and 1930s, the convention (i.e., an unwritten rule) developed in Britain that the Members of Parliament in London elected from Northern Ireland would debate no issue, and seek Westminster to make no policy, on questions of governance assigned to the Stormont Parliament in Belfast. Thus, Stormont's sectarianism, combined with Westminster's 'hands off' approach to produce a widening social divide in Ulster. In response to the perception of abuse of their fellow nationals, in 1948 the I.R.A. resurfaced in the South, using a front organization ("Clan na Poblachta") to win 10 seats at the Dail in Dublin, Eire's capital.
The Irish Government never was an IRA stooge. But the winds of nationalism in the North were nonetheless felt in the South. In 1949, the Eire government summarily withdrew from the British Commonwealth. In response to this anti-British gesture, the I.R.A. set aside its then recent difficulties with Dublin and issued a position paper stating that the Irish had a "single enemy": the British. Between 1956 and 1964, the I.R.A. used Eire as a safe haven from which to conduct anti-British operations in the North. In this "Northern Campaign," jails were broken into, British military facilities were bombed, and gradually, northern Catholics were persuaded to vote for pro-I.R.A. candidates who would after election refuse to assume their seats in the local parliament (Stormont). In reaction, Protestants in the North reorganized their own paramilitary forces: the Ulster Volunteer Force (U.V.F.). The later 1960s took this tense situation a step further.
"The Troubles" in Northern Ireland Since 1968
From the onset of a new wave of Irish nationalist unrest in 1968 to the late 1980s, between eight hundred and thirty-five hundred were killed in related political violence (O'Brien 1989). This section recounts the major features of this conflict in our times.
Civil Rights protests in Northern Ireland began in the mid 1960s over issues not entirely dissimilar from those that fueled contemporaneous protests in the USA. Government discrimination against the minority in voting rights, housing and employment had stimulated advocates for equal protection.
Grievances over Unequal Voting Rights: For example, from 1922 to 1972, suffrage (i.e., the right to vote) was granted to households, not to individuals on a one person, one vote formula. This disenfranchised spouses and of-age children living under one roof, a pattern common among Catholics but not among Protestants. Even under these unfair strictures, areas with Catholic majorities were prevented from having self-government by the regional parliament at Stormont. Electoral districts were drawn up using gerrymandering: thus, the 60 percent Catholic majority in Londonderry was made eligible to select only 40 percent of the local governing council, while the 40 percent of the city's population that was Protestant chose 60 percent of the council seats.
Grievances over Administration of Welfare systems: These also were administered in a discriminatory way by the parties derived from the governing Protestant majority. The rate of unemployment in 1968 was four times higher in Ulster than in the rest of the UK and Catholics were the most likely to be out of work. Thirty to 40 percent Catholic unemployment was common. Yet, the administrative agencies in the province were slow to allocate government housing to Catholics, and less than 30 percent of public employees were Catholic even in the city where they constituted the overwhelming majority, Londonderry.
Grievances over Police Protection of the Minority. A bloody attack by Protestant mobs on Civil Rights marchers occurred as a cross-Ulster procession reached Burntollet bridge in 1968. Paired with a police riot against Catholics the next year in Londonderry, the appearance came to be believed that growing anarchy was afoot in Ulster. These violent events were isolated, not daily, incidents. But they were also a manifestation of growing support for extremism in both ethnic communities. A 1968 public opinion poll in Ulster reported that 51 percent favored the use of violence to preserve the existing constitutional provisions governing Northern Ireland, while at the same time 38 percent of the respondents to this same poll stated than they approved of the use of violence in order to change that status. In such an atmosphere, the center could not hold and a relatively conciliatory Stormont Unionist government led by Terence O'Neill fell the next year. The old Unionist party splintered into more radical factions and those led by Rev. Ian Paisley and William Craig outstripped the support of moderates such as O'Neill. For the better part of three decades after 1969, more extreme forces within the Protestant community succeeded in gaining the affections of the voters, and nearly all MP seats in London for the province.
Military Occupation. In August 1969, at the request of the Stormont Government, British troops occupied Ulster and replaced the local police in many of their functions. Initially, this deployment was designed to protect the Catholics and the first steps by the British Army were in this direction. For example, one police auxiliary unit, the B-Specials, widely believed by many Catholics to be merely a gang of Protestant thugs, quickly was disbanded. By the early 1970s, about 14,000 British troops were in the province. Their initial peace-making objective was ignored by many, however, and within a short time the mere presence of the British Army was seized upon by Catholic extremists as a signal to resume the long dormant anti-British campaign. In January 1971, the first British soldier was killed by I.R.A. snipers. By August 1971, the British Government led by Conservative P.M. Edward Heath had passed laws providing for internment without trial of I.R.A. terrorist suspects. Conditions worsened and, in one memorable "Bloody Sunday" on January 30, 1972, 13 Catholics were killed when British troops opened fire.
Direct Rule. In March 1972, with the situation in the streets of Ulster deteriorating, the Heath Government elected to disband the local parliament (Stormont) and assumed control. Formal Direct Rule over the local affairs in the province began in 1974: all self governance was ended, 1974-99. I.R.A. terrorism against the British continued through the late 1990s, but was officially suspended after the "Good Friday Agreement" of spring 1998. In this context, other armed paramilitary forces extant among the Protestant community resurfaced. Some of these extremist groups issued statements to explain their preparations for civil war; listen to one of them: "We do not have large funds from over-indulgent sentimentally sick Irishmen of America who send the funds of capitalism to sow the seeds of communism here. We do not have the tacit support of the government of Southern Ireland and we do not have the support or interest of the British people. We are betrayed, maligned, and our families live in constant fear and misery. We are a nuisance to our so-called allies and have no friends anywhere. Once more in the history of our people we have our backs against the wall, facing extinction by one way or another. This is the moment to beware, for Ulstermen in this position fight mercilessly till they or their enemies are dead... The British army in Ulster has good soldiers who are being set up like dummy targets. The orders of the politicians are tying both hands behind their backs. The British public says, 'Send the soldiers home.' We say: 'Send the politicians and the officers home and leave us the men and weapons--or why not send the soldiers home and leave us the weapons and we will send you the I.R.A. wrapped up in little boxes and little tins like cans of baked beans" (quoted in Laqueur: 135-136).
Failed Compromises. A first attempt at a negotiated settlement, called the Sunningdale Accords, was the result of negotiations undertaken by the Conservative First Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw. Under the agreement, a 78 seat assembly was elected in June 1973, and an arrangement of executive power based on the idea of power sharing in Ulster brought both communities' leaders into a new relationship. The Executive was formed from the MPs elected by the (moderate) Official Unionist Party (Protestant), the Social Democratic and Labor Party (Catholic) and the Alliance Party (a short-lived, bi-sectarian electoral grouping). The 1973-74 Sunningdale Accords had called for the establishment of an advisory Council of Ireland which would have included some Dublin representatives; this was anathema to the growing splinter Unionist parties. Further, the Conservative Heath government which had engineered this opening, fell from power in London (over unrelated issues) before the Accord fully could be tried out. A May 1974 general strike by Protestant trade unionists of the Ulster Workers' Council signaled that the majority there were willing to take to the streets to stop any such change. The center did not hold.
The new Labour government under P.M. Harold Wilson chose not to press forward with these power-sharing arrangements, which had lost critical support in Ulster anyway. Taking a firm position against terrorism, the Labour government outlawed the I.R.A. in Ulster, a position to which the Conservatives, first under P.M. Margaret Thatcher (1979-90) and then under P.M. John Major (1990-97) continued to adhere. In response, the I.R.A. fielded candidates through its political front, Sinn Fein, and extended its campaign of assassination and bombing, throughout Ireland and onto the main island of Britain as well. Most dramatically, the IRA assassinated Lord Earl Mountbatten, last British Earl of India and uncle of Prince Phillip of Britain, while he sailed his pleasure boat off the coast of Ireland in 1979. Two minor children also died in this bombing. Nearly two decades later, in 1998, once-imprisoned IRA leader Sean O'Callaghan revealed that the Government of Syria rewarded the IRA for this daring murder with a $3.2 million dollar gift for having killed Mountbatten. The USSR and the Palestine Liberation Organization also provided the IRA operational intelligence that assisted in this deed (CNN 1998). O'Callaghan also claimed to have been involved in an unsuccessful 1983 attempt on the life of Princess Diana and Prince Charles. In August 1998, Ireland released the convicted killer of Mountbatten, Thomas McMahon, pursuant to the Good Friday agreement of April 1998 (Current History 1998a: 349).
Terrorism was not the IRA's only game, however. There also was a nationalist attempt to broaden their political support in the 1970s and 1980s. One such nationalist, Bobby Sands, campaigned and was elected an Ulster MP even though he was interned at the Maze prison at Longkesh. When the British Government was unmoved by the hunger strike he led for 66 days, Sands starved himself to death, May 1981, further inflaming passions in the province. Other hunger strikers' deaths followed, with funeral marches serving further to divide the province. Irish nationalists sought the assistance of the Eire government to challenge the conditions under which these prisoners were being held before the European Court of Human Rights, in 1976. This international court exists for the purpose of adjudicating disputes where European governments are alleged to have violated international human rights agreements, such as those contained in the Final Document of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, commonly known as the Helsinki Treaty. The court found, in the Ireland v UK case, that many of the British security forces had employed practices so inhumane and degrading as to have violated the treaty (Jennings: 24).
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher led a Conservative return to power. The Thatcher Government continued to press for democratic solutions to the "troubles," assigning James Prior to try to get a peace process begun anew. But their efforts collided with social polarization which would not support outcomes of democratic procedures that ran counter to communal demands. Thus, a newly elected, 78 member Northern Ireland Assembly (1982) foundered when Unionists refused to share power, prompting Nationalists to refuse to participate. This time the Catholic defection was broad: both the moderate SDLP and the radical Sinn Fein boycotted meetings, and both began the provocative step of discussing establishing a "New Ireland Forum" with Dublin. On the other side, Protestants now were suspicious of Thatcher's motives, so the remaining delegates used the meetings of the rump Assembly to scrutinize London's policies toward Northern Ireland. When Unionists temporarily walked out of the Assembly in 1985, it was finished, and was formally abandoned by the Thatcher Government in 1986.
By 1983, the social polarization in Ulster had become so complete, the guerrilla war so overshadowing any talk of compromise, that only one of the political parties in the Ulster general election of that year (the Alliance) even advocated power-sharing as a formula for social peace. Ominously, the Provisional Sinn Fein (an I.R.A. front) won the votes of nearly one half (43 percent) of all Catholic voters in Ulster that year. (Somewhat more Catholics cast their ballots for the traditionally more moderate, compromise oriented Social Democratic and Labour Party). Though Catholic majorities were present among the electorate in 6 of the 17 Ulster seats in Parliament in 1983, this splintering of Catholic voters' support among two predominantly Catholic political parties caused Protestant candidates to be able to not only win all eleven Protestant-majority constituencies but also to win in four of the six voting areas that had slight Catholic majorities in the electorate.
In response to the continuing impasse among ethnicities in Ulster, Irish Prime Minister Garret Fitzgerald and British Prime Minister Thatcher met in November 1983 at the country residence of the British PM (i.e., Chequers); and again one year later at the same site. No major breakthrough was achieved, but the Irish point of view appears to have been heard. Building on this first direct exchange of views, throughout 1984 British diplomat Sir Robert Armstrong continued to negotiate with Dublin terms for a new bargain about Ulster. Eventually, four points were agreed upon to guide future progress in resolving the conflict: any agreement should promote peace; any agreement should help to reconcile the two Irish traditions; any agreement should include provisions to promote cooperation in combating terrorism; and, finally, any agreement should promote better relations between Eire and Britain. Nationalists responded by bombing Harrods department store (London, December 1983) and the Conservative Party Conference at Brighton (October 12, 1984). Four were killed in the latter, though not the prime target, Mrs. Thatcher herself, who escaped unscathed.
Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. Another apparent breakthrough appeared to have been achieved on November 15, 1985: the Government of Eire and the Thatcher Government, at Hillsborogh Castle, Northern Ireland, signed an agreement on the future status of the North. Some components of the agreement were intended to reassure Protestants: (Article 1) this part of the Anglo-Irish Agreement affirmed that no change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland could occur unless the majority of Northern Irish voters agreed to a change. Elsewhere in Article 1, the accord noted that no consensus then existed in Ulster about any constitutional change; however --and this was a gesture toward the concerns of the Catholics-- the accord noted that when the majority in Ulster do want constitutional changes, then each government (Eire; U.K.) would pass enabling legislation to facilitate constitutional change. This amounted to a substantial British concession, for it indicated a willingness to legally (not merely symbolically) revise Ulster's status, sometime in the future. Another provision specifically reassured Protestants, as it called for cooperation between Britain and Eire on border security. However, the agreement broke new ground in its gestures aimed at resolving the grievances of Northern Catholics: henceforth, the Eire government was granted advisory rights in the conduct of government in Ulster, through the creation of an "Intergovernmental Conference." So long as Britain directly rules Northern Ireland, this "Conference," consisting of representatives of both the Eire and the U.K. governments will advise Britain about nearly all matters: security, cross-border relations, courts and police matters, prisons, social policy, education, etc. In the eyes of many Northern Catholics, the long dream of Eire assistance in their day-to-day quarrels with the British was achieved.
All was not made rosy, however, by a reasonable compromise (once again). In protest over the 1985 agreement, all Ulster Protestant representatives to the British Parliament resigned: they simply would not tolerate any role for Dublin in Northern Irish affairs. This forced new elections in the winter of 1986: Protestant extremists (e.g., the Rev. Ian Paisley) again won all of the Protestant areas' seats, having campaigned on a program of complete rejection of the Anglo-Irish Accords of November 1985. In the general election of 1987 these patterns continued: Protestant Unionists won 14 of the 17 Ulster seats. Though the level of spontaneous inter-communal violence gradually diminished in the following years, Protestant mobs and paramilitary organizations also became more visible and more active. In February 1987, for example, the Belfast office of the Anglo-Irish Commission, a bi-national consultative body created under the 1985 Accords, violently was attacked by a Protestant mob.
Similarly, Catholic radicals rejected the premise in the 1985 Anglo-Irish Accords that made change dependent on the agreement of the majority in Ulster. As they saw it, the will of the majority on the whole of island, not in Ulster, was what was necessary to solve the problem of Ulster democratically. Frustrations over the slow pace of change also contributed to a new generation's support for terrorist acts. Most strikingly, on November 8, 1987, 11 Unionist civilians were killed and more than 60 injured when I.R.A. bombers planted explosives along a parade route, at Enniskillen, where celebrators of the heroism of British world war veterans had assembled. This and other incidents caused British military forces to redouble their efforts to stop I.R.A. terrorism. In some instances, the means the British used also contributed to the perception among Irishmen that British forces were indifferent to procedural niceties when Irishmen are accused. A good example to support this view arose at Gibraltar, early in 1988, where three unarmed suspected I.R.A. bombers simply were shot dead by British troops; one of the wounded was rumored to have been "finished off" while lying defenseless. The negative impact on Ulster Catholic opinion created by this shocking extra judicial execution was compounded a week later at the slain persons' funeral. The Catholic crowd of approximately 3000 mourners were attacked by a grenade-throwing, pistol-shooting armed (Protestant) man who apparently had made his way past police lines to maim and murder at will, until Catholic mourners finally disarmed him. Only after the Catholic crowd had detained (and beaten) the attacker did police intervene-- a chain of events that many Catholics found to be suspicious in light of the heavy police presence in the area and the circling of a police helicopter over the I.R.A. funeral throughout most of the service. When the I.R.A. and Catholic community held another funeral for those murdered in the attack on the mourners' funeral, two British soldiers in plainclothes drove their car into the crowd parading with the coffins, a provocative act that set off a frenzy of violence that saw the soldiers publicly beaten to the crowd's cheering, kidnapped, and later shot to death by IRA gunmen.
As if these grim actions and reactions weren't enough to sour inter-communal relations, in April 1988, Protestant police bullied a Roman Catholic priest and shoved about U.S. Congressman Joseph Kennedy (Democrat of Massachusetts), who was on a fact-finding trip to Belfast. Kennedy quoted the profanities used toward both priest and US visitor by the Protestant official, and reported that he was told to "Go back to your own country." To this, Kennedy replied in terms sure to resonate truly to many an Irishmen and Irish American: "You go back to yours" (i.e., England; WP 1988a: 35). Catholic extremists, too, continued to spew ill will. In September 1988, the I.R.A. took credit for the bombing of the home of chief British representative to the intergovernmental commission through which negotiations about the troubles (including a voice for Eire) have taken place. While the representative survived the attack, he and his family suffered clinical shock from this close brush with death.
Ulster's Impact on Civil Liberties. In recognition of the apparently intractable nature of the conflict, on September 20, 1988, British Home Secretary Douglas Hurd announced that the Thatcher Government had authored amendments to the "Prevention of Terrorism Act" which, when enacted, gave to the Government the power to confiscate the assets of apparently lawful businesses whose profits the Government believes have been used to support terrorist groups (Washington Post, September 21, 1988: 27). Hurd maintained that taxi companies, "drinking clubs," and other cash businesses frequently serve as fronts for funding of terrorist groups. British civil libertarians, however, questioned the compatibility of these measures with the British common law tradition of "innocent until proven guilty," inasmuch as the measures required defendants to prove that their businesses were not involved in financing terrorism, rather than placing the burden of proof on the legal authorities to prove that they were funding the terrorists.
British responses to Irish terrorism broke new ground that would eventually alter legal protections of all British citizens' civil liberties. Early in the modern "troubles" in Ulster, the right to jury trials was suspended in Northern Ireland's terrorism cases, and detention without trial also was practiced. The steps were both unpopular in Ulster and ineffective. In October 1988, the Government introduced and in 1989 put into effect legislation that rescinded in Ulster (only) another basic liberty, the right to remain silent when accused of a crime. A statutory right under British law since 1899, this right closely resembles that which is recognized in US law within protections of the 5th Amendment. The changes, as were outlined in 1988 by Tom King, the Government's minister then in charge of Northern Ireland, permitted courts to make negative inferences when suspects would refuse to account to police when questioned about their movements, suspicious stains on their clothing, or when suspects would refuse to give evidence in court. Though at the outset these changes were carefully crafted so to apply only in Ulster, in 1994 similar changes in the right to remain silent were extended to non-terrorist offenses throughout the U.K. (WP 1994: 41). Police warnings to criminal suspects now include the statement: "You do not have to say anything. But if you do not mention now something which you later use in your defense, the court may decide that your failure to mention it now strengthens the case against you." Even conservative Englishmen were divided about the bill which was debated for more than a year prior to passage. One normally pro-Government weekly, The Economist, summed up libertarians' reservations saying it was "quite likely to produce more convictions of innocent people --something for which the British judicial system is already too well known. To a government that professes to champion the individual against the state, the right to silence is an odd target. This was one of the first, and has long been on of the most basic, protections of the individual against the abuse of state power" (WP 1994: 41).
Ulster policy also had impact on other fundamental freedoms. Late in 1988, the Government encroached on freedom of the press regarding Ulster matters by prohibiting broadcast of television and radio interviews with terrorist groups, legal political parties which support them (e.g., Sinn Fein), and even with supporters who are not formally a member of any organization! In 1994, Parliament also expanded the powers of police to stop and search vehicles and pedestrians, without any judicial warrant (WP 1994: 41), bringing British search and seizure law into line with the trend toward abbreviation of American 4th Amendment rights that have been eroded with little notice as part of the misnamed "War on Drugs."
As one would expect, Sinn Fein spokesmen denounced all of these moves, especially Government efforts to compel I.R.A. suspects' testimony. But opposition to Government encroachment onto civil liberties also was heard from more temperate Irish voices. Spokesmen for Catholic moderates who support the S.D.L.P. party responded by saying that Sinn Fein, I.R.A. and other extremists --not the Government-- would be the ones aided by all of these repressive measures, for "they will now be able to say to Catholics that there is no such thing as British justice." In England, the deputy leader of the British Labour Party, Roy Hattersley, in rare critical terms --at least insofar as Ulster policy-- also dissented from supporting the Major Government's tough new laws, saying: "I am opposed to removing the right of silence as a matter of principle, as a matter of free society, where a man or a woman must be judged innocent until proved guilty. Once we start behaving like the I.R.A., we have lost the battle." Labour's shadow secretary for Northern Ireland was still more blunt as he called the Thatcher-Major efforts in Ulster steps to create a "laboratory for draconian measures which are to be introduced [later] into the United Kingdom... Everything we stand for in our democracy is going up in smoke and the terrorists are winning all the way" (WP 1988b: 1, 28). While it also may overstate matters to say that the terrorists then were winning, it was abundantly evident that all of these restrictive measures surely did nothing to deter I.R.A. bombers from planting a bomb in the Royal Marines' Band's barracks in England, an act that killed ten on September 22, 1989; or from continuing a bombing campaign each Christmas season in the main shopping districts of England, 1988-93.
Nor was the cause of British impartiality much advanced by the May 1990 revelation from senior British police official John Stevens that 94 members of the main British army unit in Northern Ireland without authorization had leaked information about I.R.A. suspects' whereabouts to members of the 95 percent Protestant, 6500 member Ulster Defense Regiment. According to other Protestant extremist groups, these leaks then made their way from the U.D.R. soldiers to the Protestant assassination squads to better "target several alleged I.R.A. operatives for killing" (WP 1990: 22). Not only were Ulster Catholics enraged by this apparent British connection to extra judicial executions, so was the Eire Government, which then insisted the U.D.R. be disbanded.
Three further years of icy consultations between British and Irish Governments, 1990-1993, appeared to have produced little visible progress. Behind the scenes, however, quiet progress unfolded and led to a December 1993 public agreement, signed with much fanfare in Dublin and Westminster, which stated, again, that both governments would not seek any change in the constitutional status of the North without the consent of the majority. Publicly, the initial Sinn Fein reaction was negative. But, behind closed doors, in 1994 the Major Government entered into a genuine dialogue with that Nationalist party, apparently with strong encouragement from the US Clinton Administration. In September 1994, Sinn Fein's paramilitary ally, the IRA, announced a full, unilateral cease fire. The Major Government cautiously responded by stating that public talks with Sinn Fein and the IRA could commence after three months of bona fide calm from the nationalist community. Protestant paramilitaries initially tried to sour the progress with bombs of their own, and a fierce row developed between Unionist parliamentarian Paisley and Major. Within two months, however, the Protestant militias also declared a cease fire. Direct negotiations among the Major Government and the several armed Ulster factions commenced before Christmas 1994; and in late February 1995 a " framework for Agreement" pointing toward a final peace agreement ending the "troubles" was signed by the British and Irish Governments. But the Gordian Knot required more than these actors to be cut, and throughout 1995 Britain and Sinn Fein refused to meet unless the latter first agreed to disarm, a condition entirely unacceptable to Nationalists. Late in November 1995, at the intervention of Pres. Clinton, this log jam was broken by separating the issues of peace talks and disarmament talks. Sinn Fein and Britain could negotiate peace; and special U.S. representative (former Sen.) George Mitchell would head up negotiations over the arms issues. Progress toward implementation of a final agreement, however, stalled after the IRA bombed Canary Wharf in London (1996), and inter-communal clashes and bombing resumed.
The election of the Labour Government led by Tony Blair (May 1997) produced new momentum toward a negotiated settlement. Notably, the Blair team, led by Ms. Mo Mowlem, was anxious to draw the Nationalists back to the negotiating table, and by early Fall 1997 all party talks were convened which brought Unionists and Sinn Fein into the same room for the first time since 1921. Rapid progress was slowed, however, by isolated acts of bombing for which credit was taken by splinter groups of the I.R.A., and by the unwillingness of some Unionist officials to speak to Sinn Fein even though they were meeting with British officials in the very same room! These barriers to progress were compounded when, in December 1997, Billy 'the rat' Wright, an imprisoned leader of the Protestant paramilitary group Loyalist Volunteer Force (L.V.F.), was shot dead in his cell in the maximum security prison known as the Maze (aka, Long Kesh). The apparent ease with which Catholic killers could operate there frustrated other loyalist factions, and the Ulster Democratic Party (an extremist party linked to two Protestant paramilitary groups, the Ulster Freedom Fighters and the L.V.F.) withdrew its participation in the all party talks.
Good Friday Agreement of 1998. In Spring 1998, talks resumed and, after marathon bargaining sessions presided over by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, reached a conclusion early in the morning of April 11. David Trimble (leader of the Ulster Unionist Party), John Hume (leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party), and Gerry Adams (Sinn Fein leader), along with representatives of the Irish and the British Governments and nearly all other Ulster parties, signed an historic agreement that aimed, again, to end the conflict. Under its terms Eire promised to delete from its constitution the claim made there that Northern Ireland is part of Eire; that deletion occurred late in the Fall of 1999. Trimble and Hume were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in achieving this accord.
The agreement outlined a new National Assembly in Ulster, a 108 member body in which Protestants and Catholics were to govern jointly. Certain aspects of these new constitutional arrangements promoted as much discord as they promoted political stability, however. The executive role of Prime Minister was to be shared: one Catholic Deputy First Minister (i.e., Seamus Mallon of SDLP), one Protestant First Minister (i.e., David Trimble, of the Ulster Unionist Party). Either could bring about new elections by resigning at any time. This provision had the potential to undermine Cabinet unity and uniform administration. Both Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists, historically Ulster's two extremes politically, were included initially in the Cabinet, though Paisley's Democratic Unionists resigned soon after the Assembly was constituted, and went into opposition. Legislatively, the Assembly had provisions that empowered minorities. Any matter deemed by a mere 27% of the Assembly to require a super-majority (i.e., consent of a majority of each of the two communities' delegates), was required to be so approved. This provision granted to extremists a potential veto power over the operations of the Assembly, and impeded bold steps toward genuine power sharing advocated by the the SDLP and the UUP.
International conciliation also was an element of the Good Friday scheme. Lawmakers in this Assembly met periodically with Irish legislators in a new North-South Council of Irish and Northern Irish lawmakers. Additionally, another new consultative body, a Council of the Isles, was established in order to bring Irish, Northern Irish, Scottish, Welch, and English officials together from time to time. In the past, Protestant factions have sharply rejected such institutions, so the agreement of the UUP to participate in them represented progress. It also was of substantial symbolic importance that P.M. Blair was invited to visit Dublin and to speak to the Dail (Eire's Parliament). He was the first British Prime Minister ever to do so, on November 26, 1998. In his conciliatory speech, Blair declared an end to 800 years of British-Irish enmity, which was no small statement.
North and South, the agreement was accepted (May 22, 1998) by referenda: by a seventy-one percent majority of the Ulster population, and by a ninety-four percent majority of the Eire population. Many of the essential elements of a lasting formal peace thus emerged, on paper at least: signatories representing all but two Northern parties, and all of the larger parties, renounced violence and accepted the principle that no change of constitutional status could occur unless it would be accepted by the majority of voters in each of the two areas. On these conditions, Britain made a huge concession: if the outstanding security questions could be resolved, for the first time since the early 1970s the British Government agreed to withdraw from directly ruling Ulster.
Electoral Victory by Moderates. In July 1998, elections were held for the newly created Northern Ireland Assembly, the first democratic body there to be constituted on the basis of power sharing among the two religious communities. Parties supporting power sharing enjoyed a substantial majority in this balloting: David Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party (Protestant, 27 seats), Social Democratic and Labour Party SDLP (primarily Catholic, 24 seats), Sinn Fein (Catholic, 18 seats), Alliance Party (bi-sectarian, 6 seats), other small parties supporting the agreement won 3 seats. Parties generally opposed to the agreement, however, continued to enjoy substantial support, however: Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party won 20 seats, and their allied UK Unionists picked up another 5 seats; both are Protestant groups (Current History 1998b: 299). Two other independent MPs opposed to the agreement also won election.
De-Commissioning the Paramilitaries. Critical to the success of power sharing under the Good Friday agreement was the support of moderate Unionists. Of central concern to them is the matter of security, and instrumental to that end is implementation of the promised disarming of paramilitary groups, especially the IRA. During the years in which power devolved to the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive, little genuine progress on this central issue of "de-commissioning" (i.e., surrendering of arms) was made. International observers appointed to supervise the process of arms surrender were led by retired Canadian General General John de Chastelain. He reported to the Assembly in February 2000 that far more needed to be done, especially by the IRA. The representative of the U.K. Government, Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson, then suspended the Assembly, and the IRA announced it was ending cooperation with de Chastelain's group.
Remarkably, Unionist politicians remained committed to the idea of an effective bi-sectarian Assembly despite this apparent evasiveness by the IRA. In April 2000, Trimble's U.U.P. and Sinn Fein agreed to reconstitute the Power Sharing arrangement, and the Assembly teetered back into existence, with the support of Westminster. On three occasions de Chastelain's observer mission was able to certify that some concrete progress toward the goal of IRA de-commissioning had been achieved: in May 2000, in October 2001, and in April of 2002. Thus, the focus temporarily shifted to Protestant paramilitaries. After October 2001, Unionist Trimble would admit that it was Loyalist, not Nationalist, men of the gun who then were the greatest threat to the peace in the province: "The harsh reality is that the bulk of violence today is from within Loyalism."
But IRA steps toward de-commissioning were slight, and were not uniformly joined to IRA steps toward making genuine peace. In October 2002, a police raid on Sinn Fein offices in the Stormont Castle (i.e., site of the Northern Ireland Assembly) turned up evidence that these Members had obtained and copied confidential home addresses and other information about Protestant officials, evidence that was alleged to be useful to IRA paramilitaries should violence resume. Three Sinn Fein officials were arrested and charged with spying. Trimble was put in an impossible situation: either continue with power sharing even though the nationalists appeared to have broken its key provisions and face a revolt against his leadership from within the U.U.P., or force the U.K. government to suspend the Northern Ireland Assembly by threatening to pull the U.U.P. out of the arrangement. Trimble faced down his party foes, and opted for the latter course, stating: "It has been obvious for months that the IRA has not been making progress on decommissioning. They are in breach of their obligations under the Agreement and have repeatedly broken their promises to the people of Northern Ireland."
The Blair Government then obliged and, in October 2002, it suspended the Northern Ireland Assembly; the IRA then withdrew from cooperation with the de Chastelain observer mission. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 thus was put into moth balls for the next several years. The institutions it designed, institutions intended to build a genuinely shared system of power in Northern Ireland, had proved unable to meet that task, apparently. The British Government resumed direct rule over Northern Ireland late in October 2002, and shortly it was proclaimed that the materials stolen by the Sinn Fein spies in the Stormont Castle offices had dealt with issues broader even than Northern Ireland security, and included thousands of documents collected over many months which related to U.S. and U.K. government plans and operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and regarding Al Qaeda. According to usually reliable sources close to intelligence agencies, many of the most dangerous documents were reported to have been given by the Sinn Fein / IRA spies to Middle Eastern parties with long connections to international terrorism. Thus, the breakdown of the Good Friday Peace Accords in Northern Ireland, it was claimed, jeopardized allied security in the War on Terrorism.
But the actual plot that brought down "power sharing" in 2002 was still more complex. In December 2005, a British role in this affair brought the entire breakdown of "power sharing" under new scrutiny. Denis Donaldson, one of the three Sinn Fein members charged in the spy scandal, came forward to admit that he, in fact, had been a paid British spy at the time of his "arrest" for spying at Stormont. Moreover, Donaldson alleged that his service to British intelligence had begun twenty years earlier, and that he, in essence, had been for two decades a mole for the British Government at the highest counsels of the Republican movement and the Sinn Fein party. These sensational charges, which suggested the possibility that it was the British who had actually sabotaged the "power sharing" arrangement, were given further credibility when the Minister for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, curiously announced that the criminal cases against Donaldson and the others were being dropped since further legal inquiries would not serve the public interest.
On behalf of the Blair Government, Hain insisted that the spy threat from Republicans at Stormont was real, despite the sensational revelation of Donaldson's ties to British intelligence. In late December 2005, the Northern Ireland ministry continued to maintain that it "completely rejected any allegation that the police operation in October 2002 was for any reason other than to prevent paramilitary intelligence gathering... the fact remains that a huge number of stolen documents were recovered by the police."
All of this was well hidden during 2002-2005. In Spring 2003, tentative steps toward ending direct British rule faltered, ostensibly due to growing ill will in the province. A new election for the local parliament, scheduled for late May 2003, was cancelled on May Day. Prime Minister Tony Blair declared on May Day (link to news story) that the sole reason was the failure of the I.R.A. to renounce violence, as it had pledged to do in 1998. The collapse of the 1998 accord also brought tensions between Eire and London to the surface once again: Irish PM Bertie Ahern denounced Blair's suspension of progress toward electoral renewal, and the divisive politics of the two communities in the province again were reflected in international rancor.
Polarization. Compromise was the chief casualty. On November 26, 2003, elections for a new 108 seat local legislature again were held in Ulster, but unlike the results of earlier ballotings under the Good Friday framework, extremist parties won this time. Led by the 77 year old Paisley, the Democratic Unionist Party (30 seats; up 10 from 1998) passed Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party (27 seats; down one from 1998) to become the Protestant community's leading force in the province. On the Catholic side, the more extreme Sinn Fein party (24 seats, up from 18) outpolled the more conciliatory SDLP (18 seats, down from 24 in 1998). The bi-sectarian Alliance Party held on to its paltry 6 seats, and three independent candidates won seats. The 2003 results overall made even more remote the compromises needed in order to get the power-sharing experiment restarted. (Follow this link to a chart depicting the largely sectarian partisan distributions in the Northern Assembly).
The British and Irish Governments nevertheless went through the motions needed, convening a September 2004 meeting at Leeds Castle where all the affected parties were hosted for several days. As always, public centerpiece was the surrender of weapons by the IRA. On this key point, Sinn Fein representations could not overcome suspicions of Protestant hardliners: "I am too old to be bluffed. We say, we will believe it when we see it. And we're going no farther than that," stated Paisley as the meeting dissolved without agreement on Sept. 18, 2004. Protestant politicians insensitive to the growing mood of grievance among Protestant Loyalists soon were to learn the costs of being viewed as too cooperative with Catholic neighbors. In March 2005, the Orange Order formally broke its one hundred year long ties to the Ulster Unionist Party, largely because the UUP had come to be seen as too inclined to compromise on matters felt basic to Orangemen. Nor were voters in the province convinced that Nationalists in the new millennium really had good intentions. IRA / Sinn Fein foot dragging on disarming had reaped an unanticipated harvest. In the May 5, 2005 General Election to the Parliament in Westminster, Trimble's Ulster Unionists virtually were eliminated as a voice of moderation in the British Parliament, winning but one seat to nine seats won by Paisley's more extreme Democratic Unionists. Trimble himself was rejected by the voters in his constituency of Upper Bann, polling only 25 percent of votes compared to 37 percent of the DUP's David Simpson. Thus was the peacemaker, Nobel Laureate David Trimble, tossed from office by his own Protestant people; he soon resigned as leader of the UUP.
With attitudes hardening in the Protestant community and with little enthusiasm for further bloodshed in the Catholic community, quiet negotiations among the parties continued, assisted by an unlikely Blair intermediary, Conservative former Prime Minister John Major. On July 28, 2005, with British transportation systems under a new siege by terrorists of a different kind (i.e., Islamists), an apparent breakthrough was announced: the I.R.A. declared its complete abandonment of armed struggle and announced its agreement to implement all conditions earlier resisted under the 1998 Good Friday Accords. Observers across the political spectrum greeted the I.R.A. announcement with a mixture of optimism and skepticism, and several anti-IRA voices were raised over the still-unfulfilled matter of the surrender of weapons. Loyalist anger again boiled over when officials redirected some of their traditional parades during September 2005, setting off days of rioting in Belfast that led to more than fifty policemen being injured.
Conclusion
Can the years of direct British rule come to an end in a way that yields to peace in Ulster? Despite the best efforts of moderates in both Ulster communities and despite new declarations of peaceful intentions by armed men, reasonable doubts cloud the horizon. By 2006, British Governments strained to demonstrate that their role had ever been a constructive one. The pose of patient moderator Britain has tried present, one of a neutral broker interested only in engineering conciliation and peace, lost substantial credibility after the Donaldson revelations of December 2005. The achievements by all local parties toward the desirable ends of neutralizing the police, constructing an impartial civil administration, and administrating an even-handed anti-terrorism policy were jeopardized. If power-sharing had been sabotaged by Britain, on whose behalf was this done?
Thus, the deepest issue -- whether Ireland should or should not continue to be divided into two states-- remained alive and remained contested. Though the IRA pledged in 2005 to give up the gun, it also has continued to pursue the goal of a united Ireland. This goal remains anathema to nearly all loyalists and virtually all Unionist politicians. Underlying inter-communal rivalries may have been transformed from a military to an electoral problem. But if "power sharing" truly was undone by British action, as the Donaldson "spy scandal" makes it appear, then the efficacy of elections as a means of compromise is thrown into doubt. After all, if "power sharing" could be subverted in 2002, it could be subverted again.
In Ulster, too, key elements of the "Irish problem," remain acute at both the mass level and among political elites. One of the highest barriers to the final realization of a broad peace is the accumulated mistrust in both communities. When laid atop social segregation, this factor has inhibited the development of bi-ethnic civic organizations and, more generally, the type of civil society needed to support compromise, a key factor in democratic governance. Northern Ireland is well organized into groups; the groups just happen to reinforce division, not conciliation. This divided public repeatedly has given its support to intransigent elected leaders, men who in turn have appealed successfully to voters' prejudices and suspicions. When men of moderate temperament briefly led the communities (i.e., 1998-2002), the little progress that was made seems to have been subverted by actions of a British agent. In such a suspicious atmosphere, is it possible that those willing to take bold steps for peace can again win and retain public support? Perhaps with time it can happen: while weariness from the conflict did broaden in both communities in the later 1990s. But crowd symbols that divide again have shown themselves to be more durable, 2003-2006.
But are leaders present in Ulster who are capable of taking these bold steps? Some of the leaders who paved the way to the 1998 accord, e.g. Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams, do remain at the forefront, but with their prominence comes considerable baggage. Hard line Protestants continue to view Adams and Sinn Fein as too closely linked to the republican armed groups many Protestants hold centrally responsible for The Troubles. The perception has some merit. In no small measure, ties to the IRA were a key basis of Sinn Fein's appeal and for Adams' status. In taking risks for peace, Adams may have undermined the credentials from which he might once have been able to persuade more hard line Nationalists to truly give up the gun. Some of these Nationalists do not feel bound by the formal abandonment of armed struggle by the I.R.A. in 2005. Adams and Sinn Fein, it must be recalled, were unable to deliver the I.R.A. guns during the brief years of power-sharing, 1998-2002; and full surrender of those arsenals remains a key task unfulfilled in the eyes of many loyalists.
Earlier failures to achieve peace through compromise also have carried with them a heavy impact within the Protestant camp. Moderate David Trimble (Nobel Prize winner, and leader of the pro-compromise Ulster Unionist Party) subsequently has been passed over by voters favoring Ian Paisley and the Democratic Unionists, a party of congenital doubt about compromise. Trimble, without a seat in Parliament, no longer leads the U.U.P. or any important political group. As extremists and the extreme parties have risen, leaders inclined to compromise walk on tenuous ground. Eight days after the I.R.A. announced the end of its armed campaign (July 28, 2005), on August 5, 2005 Paisley publicly stated that he believed at least two years more of British direct rule will be needed in order to guarantee that the I.R.A. indeed has disarmed ("decommissioned" in British terms).
When the 108 member elected Northern Ireland Assembly was recomposed in May 2006, ostensibly to again attempt to elect executives, Paisley initially led his supporters in opposition to any power sharing formula. Despite this, a conference of the principals of all major political parties, plus Blair and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern was convened at St. Andrews (Scotland) in mid-October 2006. It met with a Nov. 24, 2006, deadline hovering over it, one set by the British Government which demanded the parties agree on executives to administer the province by that date. Troublesome policing and reconciliation issues also were to be addressed. Failure would result in the end of British salaries being paid to the members of the Assembly, mothballing democracy.
Thus, the qualities of leadership today need to go beyond simply voicing the authentic grievances of part of the whole community. Leadership will need to be demonstrated afresh not only through effective use of unpracticed democratic arts, or in acts of conciliation never made habitual within the short-lived Northern Ireland legislative and executive institutions. Leadership will also need to be demonstrated by social and political organizations acting to rein in both the gunmen within their midst, and the incitement that creates new generations of future gunmen. Once and for all, the communities must choose peace.
The vicious circle of violence, reprisal, mistrust even in times of compromise, and more violence remains unbroken. This is the key problem whenever progress toward peace seems near. New terrorist groups mistrustful of the 1998 agreement quickly emerged in both communities after the announcement of the Spring 1998 agreement; new Loyalist mob violence resurfaced within weeks after the 2005 I.R.A. peace announcement. With democratic governance remaining at its infancy, negotiations to restart bi-communal power-sharing failed in September 2004, failed again all throughout 2005, and have not succeeded in 2006. Few in either community have been inclined to seriously engage in another round of talks hosted by the British after the sensational revelations in the Donaldson spy scandal of December 2005.
In the years since the power sharing cabinet fell (i.e., since October 2002), the main moderate political organizations in each community have steadily lost influence. It is as if authority simply drains away from moderates much as it has drained away from the politicians and parties who made the 1998 compromise agreement. Law enforcement actions supported by Catholics and Protestants alike must play a crucial role in nipping any insipient return to violence in the bud, yet incitement of the crowd to further violence too often has proven the greater temptation. For example, after a deadly August 1998 bombing, a new nationalist group, the "32 County Sovereignty Committee," soon was suspected of the crime, and its members were jailed. For further example, radical young loyalists (i.e., Protestants) who rejected leaders of all parties rioted and injured many largely Protestant police in 2005 shortly after their enemies, the I.R.A., announced the end of their campaign of violence. Nothing seems to encourage compromise; all news, in this setting, is often read as bad news. Whether violent men outside the influence of those behind future peace initiatives become detainees or become martyrs in the public mind is the crucial, unanswered question.
We can be too sanguine about the healing powers of democracy. Elections in this sort of context have potent possibilities, not all good. It has been an ironclad truth for three generations that mistrust of any compromise has been the most effective election-time fodder of many Protestant leaders' appeal, as much as it has been for Sinn Fein. Notable are the dividends of this approach. After the Rev. Ian Paisley (leader of the Democratic Unionist Party) swiftly announced his absolute opposition to the Good Friday Accords of 1998, his party picked up nearly one in five voters' support at the ballot box in 1998. In local elections in 2003 and in the General Election of May 2005, the D.U.P. outpolled all other parties in the province and today are the province's largest political group. Paisley once told reporter Peter Taylor (253): "All I can say is I'll not be changing. I will go to the grave with the convictions I have."
The appeal of suspicion over hope is not new, and memories are long. Any nationalist leader who reaches out to negotiate with Paisley risks angering a political base that remembers clearly the Paisley of October 1988. Paisley, then a Unionist delegate to the European Parliament, greeted a guest appearance there by Pope John Paul II by rising to shriek "Anti-Christ!" repeatedly until he and his signs bearing the same message were forcibly removed from the hall. That such a leader still can connect with Protestant voters tells us something of the depth of skepticism bordering on social pathology in the province. Many Catholics simply cannot forgive such provocations; and fresh are the reminders that insults alone are not all that Northern Irish Catholics must fear. The very day after Protestant David Trimble and Catholic Seamus Mellon (SDLP) were confirmed as first minister and deputy first minister, respectively, of the Assembly, ten Catholic churches were burned, July 2, 1998. While those churches could be rebuilt, fire remains in the hearts of armed zealots, ready to die for their separate causes, as much now as at the start of the 20th century. That fire sometimes seems to flicker, but it clearly is not out. Within weeks of the 2005 I.R.A. peace announcement, rival Loyalist and Nationalist youth gangs fought battles with petrol bombs in North Belfast streets (August 22), and several hundred Loyalists rioted in East Belfast (August 21), attacking largely their fellow-Protestant police forces. This mood did not soon pass: throughout the weekend of September 10-11, 2005, the province endured the worst Loyalist rioting in recent memory before the violence ebbed. Like democracy, peace processes can both calm and enflame passions, it would seem.
How can calls for reason, compromise, and moderation win out? With no official voice, with no leaders present in a stalled Northern Ireland Assembly, how can support for compromise authoritatively emerge in the province? Is British direct rule during future negotiations capable of winning the trust of Catholics again, given the revelations in the Donaldson case? How can guidance to the path of patience in building a better Ulster, not the temptations of time bombs, prevail in each community if the elected leaders of these communities barely can stand to sit at the same table? The slim achievements of hateful attitudes and hateful actions for over nearly a century clearly are evident; but so are slim the achievements of democracy, compromise and "power sharing".
All communities, Nationalists and Loyalists in Ulster, British throughout the U.K., all hoped for something better. Each Northern Ireland community voted for peace in 1998, and so did all of Eire. Let us hope that that dream does die hard.
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(This reading is exclusively for use in studying for POLS 111 by enrolled students of Mary Baldwin College. Not for citation, quotation or any other use without written permission of the author: gbowen@mbc.edu .)
